Truth Is
by LondonBelow
Summary: Mimi wants Angel to be her first. Angel is not so sure this is a good idea.
1. Chapter 1

Disclaimer: Rent is not mine. At all. In any way.

**Angel**

Mimi liked to flirt by looking young, and in a way she could pass for twelve. She had these amazing eyes, big and brown and deep like you could fall into them and saturate, lined with long, curling lashes she could blink have six guys over a barrel. She looked innocent when she blinked, like a little girl who doesn't know why, and the way her lips would pout…!

Don't get me started.

Mimi looked twelve, but a little taller and with amazing breasts. Her chest started inflating like balloons at around eleven, when she was still all double-dutch and basketball and royally pissed that her body wanted to change. She tried to hide it by wearing her stepdad's big t-shirts, but everyone knew. And Mimi did her little flameball act, turning feral puppy on anyone whose gaze lingered.

Then high school started, and somehow it seemed Mimi had evened everything out. Everyone stared, and she let them. She was killer. Guys stared, girls stared, teachers stared. They stared like she was a new student they hadn't picked on for years, because she looked like the truth and they wanted to believe it. I stared, too, feeling envy for the perfect evenness of her breasts. I noticed breasts a lot those days, and I didn't know why yet because they didn't turn me on or anything, but I knew most girls' were uneven. Not Mimi's, maybe because she was ambidextrous? Whatever the reason, she had amazing breasts.

She still waited for me after school, though, and came over most days. Our feet found a bubblegum rhythm together and I heard her voice and my own answering, though we were silent.

"Hey, let's stop here."

She pulled me into the 7-11 where a man in a burgundy turban looked up when a jangling bell announced our entrance. Mimi went up to the counter and flirted while I surveyed about forty different types of gum. You could tell he didn't like being flirted with. He had skin the color of NesKwik before it's mixed in with milk and seemed to blush up underneath it, and he sneaked a lot of glances at Mimi. She leaned forward to look at the lotto cards we weren't old enough to buy; her hand flicked up to brush a strand of hair out of her eyes and "accidentally" hit the top button on her blouse.

"That is enough! You must get out now, buy something or get out!" he cried, and from the color in his face and that little jump in octave I knew why.

Mimi turned. "C'mon, Angel," and she headed out the door, jangling that little bell again. I gave the man an apologetic smile and followed.

She was still laughing when we were halfway down the block, her arm looped through mine, stumbling against me because she couldn't stand up.

"You're so weird, Mimi!"

Mimi laughed. "Sez you," she replied, making a very loving insult. She reached into my pocket and pulled out a candy bar. "Hey, Angel, I want you to be my first."

I asked, "Your first what?" even though I knew what she meant.

We arrived at our building. I unlocked the door and we raced up to the third floor. Mimi was the first to touch the blue door. "I'm first!" she said.

"Are not, are not, I was here first!" I insisted, even though I wasn't. I unlocked the door while Mimi called me a liar and we sat at the kitchen table doing homework and drinking Ovaltined milk. Well, I sat at the kitchen table doing homework and drinking Ovaltined milk. Mimi sat at the kitchen table examining her blue-painted nails and drinking Ovaltined milk.

After a while she tapped them against the edge of the table and said, "So do you want to be my first or _what_, Angel?"

_to be continued_

_written for rentfichallenge on livejournal... which is awesome. Hint, hint._


	2. Chapter 2

Disclaimer: Rent is not mine. At all. In any way.

**Mimi**

I never thought it was Angel's fault. Angel thought that I thought it was his fault… I think he thought I thought it was his fault because he thought it was his fault. Like maybe if Angel said yes, we would have gone and laid out a bath towel on the couch, since he shared his bed with like three little siblings, and he would have done that weird in-and-out thing and I would have known that it's not all the great. Actually, it sort of hurts a lot and leaves you bruised in new places, leaves you feeling puffy and raw. I guess had I known, maybe I would have died a virgin.

It was two years after that day. I still saw Angel when he came to stay with his parents, or came to visit me, or I went out and found whatever cheerful little hole had become his home for however brief a time. And Angel starting becoming she, which was sort of surprising because I always thought Angel was just gay, but apparently he preferred being a woman. Which is fine. I did, too, up until I had to do woman things. Y'know. Get fucked.

This girl in my class, Juanita, had a really cliché quinceñera in her parents' backyard, and invited every girl in our year. Her parents gave her earrings with bloodred stones about the size of her ears, and she wore them all night, proud, stretching her piercings into gaping wounds. Somehow I ended up paired with her cousin from out of town, Reynaldo, who was actually all right except that he wore too much cologne and had stubble and stuck his tongue down my throat. He had a sort of cloudy left eye, but it didn't seem to hamper him. I had to dance with him all night. I'm still not sure why, but Juanita kept saying it would be totally offensive to just ditch him.

You know what happened at Juanita's quinceñera, with me in my pretty pink dress that I argued about because it was too girly, too conservative, like that mattered. I don't need to tell you what went on behind the garage in her parents' house in Queens, except maybe to say that the thistles grew knee-high and I was wearing white Keds. And I guess it would be redundant to say that afterwards I cried, or that the last thing he did before walking away was grab my breasts and say, "Honk, honk."

I stayed behind the garage for the rest of the party. I traced designs in the dirt and nettles stung up the fleshy place inside my arm and after a while I was joined by those nasty-ass ants that bite you up. I stayed until my mom was there to pick me up, and she yelled at me in Spanish for being dirty, right there where every girl in my class could hear, and for months held against me that I ruined my pretty pink dress the first time I wore it when in the dressing rooms I had been so excited I said I would wear it to prom.

We were getting drunk, years later, all of us, Angel and me and Collins and Roger and Mark, and Maureen was there, and everyone was talking about "My first time…" like Roger and Mark was any surprise, or Collins and some foreign exchange student named Jacques, and Maureen told some weird story about a painter who had her model for three days and then "made love" to her while they inhaled turpentine. Then she said, "What about you Mimi?"

I looked to Roger, but he wasn't objecting, so I just said, "Angel." I guess that's what matters the most in a friendship, someone trusting you enough to just agree, or maybe I was just manipulating Angel because Roger's the kind of douche to make this a big fucking deal and look up Reynaldo and shoot him.

So I said it was Angel and Roger spat out his beer and Collins asked if he needed kleenex or was just going home to change.

The truth is whatever you can convince someone to believe.


End file.
